The big pop event-video has been flailing in recent times, though there have been plenty of contenders. Taylor Swift’s endlessly teased, celebrity-heavy Bad Blood video failed to live up to the extraordinary hype, glossing out any personality or bite and ending up resembling an ad for hair dye. Madonna brought together the biggest pop stars in the world for her Bitch I’m Madonna clip, but the final result was more French and Saunders spoof than cultural moment. In fact, the most successful videos have been the less showy, more understated ones: Sia’s use of interpretative dance in Chandelier, Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé eating burgers and having a great time together in Feelin’ Myself, Beyoncé goofing around in hotel rooms for 7/11. Going big in videos was for Lady Gaga in her prime, not the pop stars of 2015.

Until now. Rihanna has released a video for the track Bitch Better Have My Money – three months after it first appeared – and it’s as overstated as you might expect from a singer who performed it live for the first time wearing a neon-green fur coat and jumping out of a helicopter. It’s big, gory, ambitious and funny.

It’s NSFW, as the comprehensive warnings – language , nudity, violence – make clear. Now might be a good time to prepare the thinkpiece bingo card. Are Rihanna’s boobs antifeminist? Are Rihanna’s boobs really feminist (#freethenipple)? Is this video an indictment of late capitalist excess? Is this video about gender? Is this video about race? Does this video glamorise kidnapping? (It really does make being kidnapped by Rihanna and her friends seem more like a competition prize than deadly peril.)

But this video is more a cartoon than a work that deserves weighty analysis. Over seven minutes of neon, sun-soaked, graphic-novel violence, Rihanna plays out the story of the song with a near-literal interpretation of the lyrics. She kidnaps a Real Housewife of Beverly Hills type from her fancy hotel and, transporting her in a trunk, submits her to various tortures, from swinging her half-naked upside down in a deserted barn, to sitting her in a paddling pool on a yacht, to partying in a motel room. (Like I said, only some of these seem like ordeals.) But the “bitch” – who turns out to be Hannibal actor Mads Mikkelsen – does not care about his kidnapped wife, because he’s too busy firing wads of cash out of handguns with various naked women around, so Rihanna decides to do away with him, Dexter-style. It ends with a closeup of her face, covered in blood, like Carrie looked leaving the prom. It’s gruesome, sure, but it’s also quite daft. The music video as an event is back.

Rihanna’s place near the top of the pop landscape was once guaranteed, thanks to relentless arena tours and new albums almost every year, and she’s been an always on-point choice of producers and songwriters. This comeback, after no studio album since 2012, has felt more risky and less accessible, like she’s careering around, looking for something to land, unsure where that will be. BBHMM is harder, meaner and not as palatable than previous singles. There’s no Calvin Harris remix here. Her style choices are less high street, more high fashion. She’s no longer a nice, relatable ingenue. This video is not necessarily an indication that Rihanna has found her direction, but it is more confident than anything she’s done for this campaign so far, including the song it is promoting.